The talk will present a vision of how multicore and new architectures are impacting parallel programming in the high performance contex. We consider that the evolution towards increasing complexity, scale and variability in our systems makes two technologies play a very important role in the future parallel computing. On one side, programming models that hide the actual complexity of he underlying hardware provide the programming productivity and performance portability required to ensure the economic sustainability of the programming efforts. On the other side, performance analysis tools with very detailed analytics capabilities are key to understanding the actual behavior of our systems and drive code refactoring in the most productive direction. We also firmly believe that beyond having access to specific advanced technologies in those areas, a key factor required to successfully survive the revolution we are living is a cultural chage in the mindset of programmers. I will argue that we must change from the “old” latency dominated mindsets and practices to a “new” througput oriented vision of computing.

Using the OmpSs programming model and performance analysis tools developed at BSC as a conductor, we will show how we think the challenges new architectures are posing should be addressed.

Jesus Labarta is full professor on Computer Architecture at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) since 1990. Since 1981 he has been lecturing on computer architecture, operating systems, computer networks and performance evaluation. His research interest has been centered on parallel computing, covering areas from multiprocessor architecture, memory hierarchy, programming models, parallelizing compilers, operating systems, parallelization of numerical kernels, performance analysis and prediction tools.   Since 2005 he is responsible of the Computer Science Research Department within the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He has been involved in research cooperation with many leading companies on HPC related topics. His major directions of current work relate to performance analysis tools, programming models and resource management. His team distributes the Open Source BSC tools (Paraver and Dimemas) and performs research on increasing the intelligence embedded in the performance analysis tools. He is involved in the development of the OmpSs programming model and its different implementations for SMP, GPUs and cluster platforms. He has been involved in Exascale activities such as IESP and EESI where he has been responsible of the Runtime and Programming model sections of the respective Roadmaps. He leads the programming models and resource management activities in the HPC subproject of the Human Brain Project.